Under a Blue Moon

Flickr Favorites (please click link to see the source of these beautiful images)

• Clever use of space if you ask me:  Spice Rack  There is so much you can do with just standard trim pieces that looks very custom and adds great detail to a space
• I love drinking wine out of a pretty glass.
• Pretty paper ranunculus (Trivia:  This post of mine get more hits than anything I have ever done.  The picture of it on Flickr has over 70,000 views!)
• Ha!  Pretty much how I feel about how fast time is whizzing by
• 10 Simple Things to Make You Happier in the Kitchen (for me – especially 3 and 6)

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend planned.  I feel like I'm coming down with something (evidently there is some sort of flu epidemic hitting the country…) so I'm just trying to rest and eat calm things and pretend I'm not really sick.  

It's hard to put that .13 in my post titles.  Can you believe it is the 9th of January already?  The year is just flying by.

So I mentioned in a previous post that I had lost a few pounds.  I thought I would take a few minutes and just tell you how I did it.  I am by no means a diet or exercise expert.  Not by a long shot.  I do know what works for me and I'm going to share that.

Jump in.

Really that is all it takes.  Don't overthink it.  Don't overplan it. 

Mid August of last year I was on a road trip with my cousin and her daughter.  We spent the week driving to Kansas to drop her daughter (along with her car) off at school and we enjoyed eating out and drinking the entire time.  On the airplane home my cousin and I talked about the next time we would see her daughter and vowed to lose weight before by then.

We figured that by Christmas we could each lose 25 lbs.  

That is all it took.  Something just clicked.  I cannot tell you how many diets I have started and stopped.  How many exercise programs I vowed to conquer.  I truly believe the timing just needs to be right. You have to be at a point where you know that you truly need to dedicate yourself.  That it will be hard but you can do it.  And that you need to take it one day at a time.  Sometimes you even need to break that down to ten minutes at a time.   

I started by giving up alcohol (no more nightly glass or five of wine). And I counted calories.  

I had remember that a couple of years ago I had signed up with MyFitnessPal.com so I thought I was see if my account was still active.  MFP (as it is easier to refer to it) is a calorie and exercise tracker.  It has quite an extensive database of foods with the calories and nutritional information already calculated.  All one needs to do is search for a food and add it to their daily food diary.  

Disclaimer:  This is not a sponsored post.  I will be gushing about MFP but it is just one tracking tool – there are others out there.  

If a food isn't in the database you can add it.  You can also enter recipes and it will calculate the calories and nutritional information for each serving.  I find this really handy for recipes that I make often.

Anyway – I tried to log in and sure enough my account was still there. Thank goodness it was.  I started logging everything I ate.  I downloaded the iPhone app and started using that when I was away from my computer.  It has become as routine as chewing to me now. Put something in my mouth.  Chew it.  Swallow it.  Log it. 

I was instantly rewarded with a rapid 5-7 lb. weight loss.  Oh yay! This is going to be easy.  Then my 52 year old metabolism said "hey wait a minute…" and I went weeks where I lost nothing or maybe a half a pound every couple of weeks.  But I kept at it.  I read the MFP forums voraciously, looking for inspiration and guidance.  I upped my calories a bit and the weight started coming off again.  Slow and steady.

After losing about 15 lbs. I started waking.  Then I added a little bit of running.  Weight still came off, slow and steady.  I've lost 46 pounds so far and still want to lose some more.

I think the key to my success is I eat whatever I want.  Just not as much of it as I want.  I even drink wine again.  Mostly just on the weekends and I stop after a couple of glasses.  I don't feel like I'm "dieting."  I feel like I've just changed my eating habits for the better and that this isn't a quick fix – it is a lifestyle change.

I'm enjoying cleaning out my closet of clothes that no longer fit and buying new things.  I've spent the last ten years trying to blend into the wood work so my clothes were drab and dark so I'm trying to branch out of my comfort zone and I'm buying clothes that are actually in color.  Some even have a pattern to them!  

I keep picturing myself, sitting on that plane and making the decision that this time I was going to make it happen.  That I was worth it.